...So it has come to pass, here in the closing years of the
twentieth century. With the weakening of the moral order, “Things fall apart;
mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. . . .” The Hellenic and the Roman
cultures went down to dusty death after this fashion. What may be done to
achieve reinvigoration?
Some well-meaning folk talk of a “civil religion,” a kind of
cult of patriotism, founded upon a myth of national virtue and upon veneration
of certain historic documents, together with a utilitarian morality. But such
experiments of a secular character never have functioned satisfactorily; and it
scarcely is necessary for me to point out the perils of such an artificial
creed, bound up with nationalism: the example of the ideology of the National
Socialist Party in Germany,
half a century ago, may suffice. Worship of the state, or of the national
commonwealth, is no healthy substitute for communion with transcendent love and
wisdom....
...and proposes an answer to the implicit question:
...the culture can be renewed only if the cult is
renewed; and faith in divine power cannot be summoned up merely when that is
found expedient. Faith no longer works wonders among us: one has but to glance
at the typical church built nowadays, ugly and shoddy, to discern how
architecture no longer is nurtured by the religious imagination. It is so in
nearly all the works of twentieth-century civilization: the modern mind has
been secularized so thoroughly that “culture” is assumed by most people to have
no connection with the love of God....
...How are we to account for this widespread decay of the
religious impulse? It appears that the principal cause of the loss of the idea
of the holy is the attitude called “scientism” - that is, the popular notion
that the revelations of natural science, over the past century and a half or
two centuries, somehow have proved that men and women are naked apes; that the
ends of existence are production and consumption; that happiness is the
gratification of sensual impulses; and that concepts of the resurrection of the
flesh and the life everlasting are mere exploded superstitions. Upon these
scientistic assumptions, public schooling in America is founded nowadays, implicitly.
C S Lewis (The Abolition of Man) noticed it.
This view of the human condition has been called - by C. S.
Lewis, in particular - reductionism:
it reduces human beings almost to mindlessness; it denies the
existence of the soul. Reductionism has become almost an ideology. It is
scientistic, but not scientific: for it is a far cry from the understanding of
matter and energy that one finds in the addresses of Nobel prize winners in
physics, say. Popular notions of “what science says” are archaic, reflecting
the assertions of the scientists of the middle of the nineteenth century; such
views are a world away from the writings of Stanley Jaki, the cosmologist and
historian of science, who was awarded in 1987 the Templeton Prize for Progress
in Religion
The societal/political results were detailed by Solzhenitsyn--but not only in his Gulag. His writing on Western society has been studiously ignored by the faux-conservatives AND the dedicated Left.
Eliot's Geronton:
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues,
deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by
vanities
Plenty more at the link.
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